is comedy inherently conservative?

haaaa

Is Bill Hicks the transitional figure between L Bruce's transgressive/progressive vanguard and the stereotype-ridden, anti-PC shock humor employed by Howard Stern, Seth Macfarlane, and Ric Delgado?

i don't think hicks has been all that influential on mainstream humor in the u.s. -- he was barely ever on TV and was virtually unknown here till he died. he got a posthumous cult following but i see him as more a one-off guy than any kind of transitional figure. his style of humor is also completely different from those guys imo -- i can't see any hicks influence in macfarlane, for sure.

arguably hicks was one of the major touchstones for "alternative comedy" (lol remember when that was a thing) which after a brief detour thru the truth about cats and dogs gave us endless ben stiller flicks gave us "meet the parents" gave us i dunno. but rewind and "alternative comedy" also birthed a whole generation of sketch shows birthed a school of rapid-fire shockimprov and dead end reference and repetition for the sake of it arguably playing a role in the humor of family guy. i mean from the right angle, you really can see it as the slow stepbrother of wonder showzen or whatever.

I remember when that was a thing, it was the 80s in the UK - I suspect that from a US perspective alternative comedy probably seemed like hearing a musical genre but not listening to the bands the artists were listening to.

i have been attempting to keep up w/this v interesting thread since horseshoe started it but i keep being busy and not having time and falling behind. soz if these points have been done already, i skimmed a couple of times

- i broadly agree w/horseshoe's argument. one of the most negative things about comedy (nb: i think everything about comedy is negative and abhorrent) is the way it tries to bully you towards consensus, to assume consensus into existence, and a lot of the time it's not even via what the joke is "about" but the language and the details used in telling it, and that shit is insidious

- the laughing upwards vs laughing downwards binary is dumb. very often comedy thinks it's laughing upwards but actually is so tone-deaf and unaware of its own privilege/power that it can't see how it's also bullying. misogynist jokes at the expense of women like louise mensch or paris hilton or, for that matter, every woman in the public eye ever, are an obvious example

- "laughing at oneself" comedy trades on self-loathing but still requires that assumption of consensus; fundamentally it seeks to drag its audience down to the base level of its creator, and often the implication is that anyone who refuses to degrade themselves in that way is pompous or up themselves or humourless. it really is the very worst human activity imo.

- <3 banaka

don't you think that pretty much all art is trying to 'force' you to feel something, in very much the same way? do you never feel as if music, film, literature is trying to manipulate you emotionally as part of the experience? why judge all of comedy so negatively based on phenomena that are hardly unique to it?

oh good, we finally got some genuinely humorless people itt to talk about comedy

'finally'

haha oh lex! i don't know if my initial post rises to the level of an argument. i love that you hate comedy, though.

I find it weird when ppl see heirs of Lenny Bruce in people who never address politics, or if they do they're reactionary or bigots (Sam Kinison, Stern in the '80s).

Morbs just made one of the points I was about to mention!

I think at a certain level the news-parody shows like The Daily Show and Colbert are less subversive than confirmations of where the mainstream actually is. It's pretty uncommon that the deconstruction of the news actually pulls something out far enough to make the opposing political point; it's only illuminating how ridiculous exaggerations of viewpoints that differ from the norms really sound.

My UK humor knowledge is kind of shallow but some of the past Chris Morris or Charlie Brooker projects are ones that I would say were more acerbic but also aimed at bringing things back to a healthy norm.

Colbert comes much closer to Bruce than Stewart ever does, at least on TV, since playing his Fox-y character is not unrelated to LB "relaxing his colored friend" at a party by saying, "Let's face it, you wouldn't want some Jew doin' it to your sister" in 1958...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oWk4ZiuSHE

you know what's conservative, that recent run of Mark Twain Prize winners. God Almighty.

I'm less bothered by the "conservatism" of the picks as much as the fact that the last three have been relatively young. Mort Sahl's not going to be around forever.

They want to make their picks "relevant," ie translate into a TV special. And Sahl would rant against Obama, we can't have that.

can't believe I missed the part where contenderizer explains lolcats

the best thing about the internet is that i'm still doing it and will be forever, you only have to scroll back a little...

http://www.suck.com/daily/97/11/07/index.html

friend who is starting a feminist comedy troupe yelled at me for this kind of thinking btw so i retract it

huh, what was her line?

the psychological/physical rupture of a joke or gag, the very impulse to laugh, can be seen a model of the incompleteness or rupture of any system. not utopian but a spasm of happiness in a hard world etc maybe?

(not speaking for this person, just thinking about this again)

ergh i'm trying to think of a word that's on the tip of my tongue... social/lit theory about 'irruption' or a holiday, but it can't last. dammit my brain is fried right now. jubilee? that's not it

she was basically like, that is just the argument *entrenched comedy interests* make to excuse their sexist/racist/conservative jokes, and there's a way to be funny that could be loosely characterized as progressive. and then she used a joke a female comedian told in her presence about relief that a random street harasser called her fat and didn't rape her as evidence. (obvs not funny the way i've related it, but presumably funny in the actual delivery.) i don't know; i didn't argue further about whether that kind of joke still has a reactionary/conservative/whatever the fuck i think i'm talking about vibe, because i felt like a jerk doing it when she was so excited about the feminist potential of comedy. also i feel like i can't possibly be right; it's just too sweeping of a thing to think.

xxp actually i bet she would agree with that!

carnivalesque?

jouissance?

like in barthes?

CARNIVALESQUE!

yeah. shit.

bakhtin is all right as fucking assholes i had to read in graduate school go

oh i know all this stuff second- or thirdhand at best

it is a rule of thumb of mine not to trust people or institutions that don't get a joke (that doesn't make the opposite rule true tho)

we need to draw a line between "doesn't get a joke" and, "'can't take a joke?'"

i h8 people who try to make jokes

A lot of conventional humor is based upon staid, conservative social stereotypes, such as the cartoons about women posted near the top of the thread by Abbott, but it is important to note that such 'establishment' humor rarely, if ever, provokes open laughter. Such jokes are similar to the plastic models of food that are sometimes displayed in the front windows of restaurants to give prospective patrons a more visceral idea of what is on the menu. They provoke recognition, as in "I can see this is a joke, because it is formed like one", but nothing more.

Real laugh-until-you're-crying-and-weak humor is never conservative.

i love you lex

xp

i am also pro people who can't take a joke because to me they are standing up for their DIGNITY and that is one of the most valuable things that a human possesses

conversely making a joke at someone's expense is an attempt to take away that dignity and is inherently cruel

which is fine when you WANT to be cruel obv but you really can't take offence at someone not wanting to take it

"take a joke" and "get a joke" are absolutely different qualities

the lex walks into a bar

i think goole was talking about when assholes say, "can't you take a joke?" after they've said something cruel/gross/horrible?

"what's this music that's playing?" he asks the bartender

"bob dylan," the bartender replies

"IS THIS SOME SORT OF JOKE," shouts the lex

precisely!

lol xp to hs

would lol @ a book of "a lex walks into a bar" joeks

i was thinking about this thread during the whole tosh rape-joke thing

yeah my friend basically started her troupe because of the tosh "joke"

i thought a lot of the response that was kind of stupid. i dunno, all the liberal writers trying to like set up rules about "here's how to make a funny rape joke" and analyzing why tosh's joke was "bad" and this other rape joke is "good"... it was so

ime ostensibly "progressive" or lefty comedy is maybe even more repulsively conservative than the dad jokes and stereotype-reinforcing unhumour that's the obvious subject of this thread

the defenses of tosh were even stupider, obviously

i had to drop out of the internet temporarily when the tosh joke happened...i can't really talk about it rationally tbh